INTRODUCTION.
The London publishers annually issue statistics of the works that haveappeared in England during the year. Sometimes sermons and books ontheology reach the highest figures; England is still the England of theBible, the country that at the time of the Reformation produced threehundred and twenty-six editions of the Scriptures in less than acentury, and whose religious literature is so abundant that to-daytwenty-eight volumes of the British Museum catalogue treat of the singleword Bible. When theology does not obtain the first rank, it holds thesecond. The only writings that can compete with it, in the country ofShakespeare, of Bacon and of Newton, are neither dramas, nor books ofphilosophy nor scientific treatises; they are novels. Theology had thesupremacy in 1885; novels obtained it in 1887, 1888, and 1889. Omittingstories written for children, nine hundred and twenty-nine novels werepublished in England in 1888, and one thousand and forty in 1889. Thusthe conscientious critic who wished to acquaint himself with all of themwould have to read more than two novels and a half, often in threevolumes, every day all the year round, without stopping even on Sundays.
This passion for the novel which does not exist in the same degree inany other nation, only acquired its full strength in England in theeighteenth century. At that time English novels produced in Europe theeffect of a revelation; they were praised extravagantly, they werecopied, they were imitated, and the popularity hitherto enjoyed by the"Princesse de Cleves," "Marianne," and "Gil Blas," was obscured for awhile. "I say that Anglicism is gaining on us," wrote d'Argenson; "after'Gulliver' and 'Pamela,' here comes 'Tom Jones,' and they are mad forhim; who could have imagined eighty years ago that the English wouldwrite novels and better ones than ours? This nation pushes ahead byforce of unrestricted freedom."[1]
Modern society had at length found the kind of literature which couldbe most suitably employed to depict it. Society had been presented onthe English stage by the authors of domestic comedies; Steele andAddison had painted it in their essays. But in both forms the portraitwas incomplete. The exigencies of the stage, the necessary brevity ofthe essay, made it impossible to give adequate expression to theinfinite complexity of the subject. The novel created anew by Defoe,Fielding, and Richardson, made it an easy thing to introduce into thearena of literature those men and women of intelligence and feeling who,for long ages, had been pleased to see other people the chief subjectsof books and inwardly desired that authors should at last deal moreespecially with themselves. The age of chivalry was gone; the time ofthe Arthurs and the Tristans had passed away; such a society as the newone could not so well be sung in verse; but it could extremely well bedescribed in prose.
As Fielding remarked, the novel takes the place of the old epic. Wethink of the Harlowes when in the olden time we should have dreamed ofthe Atridae. While man's attachment to science and demonstrated truth isgrowing year by year, so, simultaneously, the art of the historian andthe art of the novelist, both essentially empirical, become more highlyvalued and more widely cultivated. As for the lengthy tales devoted toTristan and to "l'Empereur magne," we know that their day is done, andwe think of them with all the pensive tenderness we cannot help feelingfor the dead, for the dim past, for a race without posterity, forchildhood's cherished and fast-fading dreams. Thus in the same age whenClarissa Harlowe and Tom Jones came to their kingdom, the poetsChatterton, Percy, Beattie, and others, turned back lovingly to theMiddle Ages; and thus too the new taste for history, archaeology, and thepainting of real life, all put together and combined, ended by producinga particular school of novel, the _romantic_ school, at whose headstands Sir Walter Scott.
Perhaps, however, something besides poetry is to be sought for in thesebygone epochs. Movements of human thought have seldom that suddennesswith which they are sometimes credited; if those literary innovations,apparently so spasmodic, are carefully and closely studied, it will benearly always found that the way had been imperceptibly prepared forthem through the ages. We are in the habit of beginning the history ofthe English novel with Defoe or Richardson; but was there no work of thekind in England before their time? had they to invent it all, matter andmethod? It is not enough to say that the gift of observation andanalysis was inborn in the race, as shown already, long before theeighteenth century, in the work of the dramatists, moralists andphilosophers. Had not the same gift already manifested itself in thenovel?
The truth is that the novel shed its first splendour during the age ofElizabeth; but the glory of Shakespeare has overshadowed the multitudeof the lesser authors of his time, a multitude which included the earlynovelists. While they lived, however, they played no insignificant part;now they are so entirely forgotten that it will perhaps be heard withsome surprise that they were prolific, numerous, and very popular. Sogreat was the demand for this kind of literature that some succeeded inmaking an income out of their novels. Their books went through manyeditions for that age, many more than the majority of Shakespeare'splays. They were translated into French at a time when even the name ofthe great dramatist was entirely unknown to the French people. Lyly's"Euphues," for example, went through five editions in five years; in thesame period "Hamlet" passed through only three, and "Romeo and Juliet"through two editions. Not a line of Shakespeare was put into Frenchbefore the eighteenth century, while prose fictions by Nash, Greene, andSidney were translated more than a century earlier.
As in our own day, some of these novelists busied themselves chieflywith the analysis of passion and refined emotion; others chieflyconcerned themselves with minute observation of real life, and strove toplace before the reader the outward features of their characters in afashion impressive enough to enable him to realize what lay below thesurface. Many of these pictures of manners and of society wereconsidered by contemporaries good likenesses, not the less so becauseembellished. Thus, having served as models to the novelists, the men andwomen of the day in their turn took as example the copies that had beenmade from them. They had had their portraits painted and then tried hardto resemble their counterfeit presentments. Lyly and Sidney embellished,according to the taste of the age, the people around them, whom theychose as patterns for the heroes of their novels; and as soon as theirbooks were spread over the country, fashionable ladies distinguishedthemselves from the common sort by being "Arcadian" or "Euphuizd."[2]
Thus through these very efforts, a literature, chiefly intended forwomen, was arising in England, and this is one characteristic more thatlinks these authors to our modern novelists. So that, perhaps, bonds,closer than we imagine, unite those old writers lost in a far-off pastwith the novelists whose books reprinted a hundred times are to be foundto-day on every reading-table and in everybody's hands.
We make no pretence of covering in the present volume this vast andlittle trodden field. To keep within reasonable bounds we shall have toleave altogether, or barely mention, the collections of tales translatedby Paynter, Whetstone and others from the Italian or French, althoughthey were well known to Shakespeare, and provided him with several ofhis plots. In spite of their charm, we shall in like manner pass by thesimple popular prose tales, which were also very numerous, the storiesof Robin Hood, of Tom-a-Lincoln, of Friar Bacon, however "merry andpleasant," they may be, "not altogether unprofitable, nor any wayhurtfull, very fitte to passe away the tediousness of the long wintersevenings."[3] We intend to deal here chiefly with those writers fromwhom our modern novelists are legitimately descended. These descendants,improving upon the early examples of their art left by the Elizabethannovelists, have won for themselves a lasting place in literature, andtheir works are among the undisputed pleasures of our lives. Ourgratitude may rightly be extended from them to their progenitors. Wemust be permitted, therefore, to go far back in history, nearly as faras the Flood. The journey is long, but we shall travel rapidly. It was,moreover, the customary method of many novelists of long ago to beginwith the beginning of created things. Let their example serve as ourexcuse.
CANCER.]
FOOTNOTES:
[1] "Memoire
s et Journal inedit du Marquis d'Argenson," Paris, 1857, 5vols.; vol. v., "Remarques en lisant."
[2] Dekker, "The Guls Horne-booke," 1609.
[3] "The Gentle Craft," 1598. "Early English Prose Romances," ed. W. J.Thoms, London, 2nd edition, 1858, 3 vols., 8vo, contents: "Robert theDevyll," "Thomas of Reading," by Thomas Deloney, "Fryer Bacon," "FrierRush," "George a Green," "Tom-a-Lincoln," by Richard Johnson, "DoctorFaustus," &c. Nearly all the stories in this collection bear the date ofShakespeare's time.
BEGINNING OF THE UNIQUE MS. OF "BEOWULF."]